If you’re a developer who’s either into building games or has been meaning to try out game development, you’re in luck this weekend. From Friday, January 30th through Sunday, February 1st, the Global Game Jam will be held in various cities all over the world, giving people a chance to collaborate on the design, building and presentation of a videogame in a single weekend.

The participating Canadian cities and their Global Game Jam venues are:

At CUSEC 2009, some of the attendees attempted to psychoanalyze the speakers out of concern for what seemed to be obsessions. The IRC backchannel during my presentation expressed concern for what they believed to be my fixation on butts, what with mentioning the movie Deliverance and showing the “Bottle Rocket in the Butt” video from my blog entry Assrockets and Opportunities.

Other speakers had their own obsessions. Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman’s twin obsessions were with the level of lighting in the room and his “Four Freedoms” ethics. Pownce lead developer/co-founder and now Six Apart developer Leah Culver (who was on the conference’s other end of the scruffy/slinky spectrum) was obsessed about getting a tattoo based on designs created by the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff(or _why for short). Leah somehow managed to contact _why – who is notoriously J.D. Salinger-esque in his reclusiveness – to commission him to create some tattoo designs, which she showed me at the CUSEC speaker dinner last Thursday night.

Back then, a computer in the home was very unusual, hence their underscoring of this interviewee’s name with “owns home computer”. It seems quaint now, but back then, that was pretty 1337:

The TechCrunch article points out a couple of lines in the piece that stand out given our 2009 perspective. The first is from the San Francisco Examiner’s David Cole:

This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.

The other memorable line is from the reporter:

This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.

This is Joey deVilla, signing off from one of those Dynabook-style computers.

From looking at Microsoft’s surveys of Canadian developers and plain old talking to people (something I love to do), it seems that many people who call themselves “developers” wear many hats, one of which is “manager”. If this is the case, I’ll bet that the title of this article has piqued your curiosity.

Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person’s obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.

The article goes into more detail, but its general gist is that what a candidate does in his or her spare time might be a good indicator of his or her fit for the position. Looking for a star developer? It’s probably one who’s got a hobby programming project on the side. Seeking an ace IT pro? Someone who’s converted an old computer into a home entertainment unit might be a good pick.

You might want to go beyond the article’s focus on hiring others and turn it around: what do you do in your spare time? Do any of you extracurricular activities suggest that you’d be good at your job?